(Left) A colorful Laugavegur street. (Top right) Cod-fan Siggi Hilmarsson stops by a local Reykjavík fish market for the catch of the day. (Bottom right) Playful graffiti adorns the wall of Cafe Babalú, one of Reykjavík’s many cozy eateries.Nicholas Gill

As a tourist in Iceland, you often see skyr before you see the sun. It’s not that the weather is bad — nearby Greenland is actually the icier island — it’s that most flights to Reykjavík from NYC fly overnight. Therefore, you arrive in the early morning and at your first hotel breakfast, like at the posh Hotel 101 where I stayed last December, there’s a huge bowl of skyr, served with fresh berries or granola.

Skyr is like Greek yogurt but with less sugar and more protein. According to the Viking Sagas, Icelanders have made skyr since the 9th century. It’s the quintessential Icelandic breakfast, though it’s quickly becoming an American one, too.

Siggi Hilmarsson, an Iceland native who missed eating skyr while living in New York (he moved here to pursue an MBA from Columbia), began experimenting in 2004 with his own recipe. Flash-forward a decade and Siggi’s skyr, made upstate in Yates County, is a household name.

After tasting something as good as skyr, I figured there must be more to Iceland. You hear stories of fermented shark meat and scant daylight and the country sounds rather unpleasant. So when Hilmarsson invited me to Reykjavík and see what else was going on, my curiosity could not be contained.

“The cod industry is tightly regulated yet it’s thriving… It’s why much of the cod in Cape Cod supermarkets now comes from Iceland.”

On my first morning our first stop was at a small bakery in Reykjavík near where Hilmarsson grew up.

We buy a thin, unleavened rye bread called flatkökur and then hangikjöt (smoked lamb), at the butcher shop next door. Hilmarsson smears butter on the bread and layers it with thinly sliced lamb; if we didn’t have other stops I could have eaten this all day.

We continue on to a small fish market to see cod, which is woven into the history of Iceland.

The cod industry is tightly regulated yet it’s thriving. Populations are increasing here while they are threatened elsewhere in the Atlantic. It’s why much of the cod in Cape Cod supermarkets now comes from Iceland.

For lunch, we stop at 3 Frakkar, a restaurant specializing in Icelandic home cooking. We’ve come here for comfort foods, like herring, hashed fish with black bread and cod cheeks served in a rich, buttery sauce. There are also exotic offerings like smoked puffin breasts and hákarl, fermented shark. “It’s not exactly like my mother used to make,” Hilmarsson says, “but it’s good here.”

Later we grab coffee at Reykjavík Roasters, the city’s most progressive coffee shop. There’s Lou Reed singing from a record player and mismatching old wood tables. It could be mistaken for Brooklyn.
“Even before Iceland modernized we had good coffee,” Hilmarsson says.

In the evening we stop at the home studio of Birgir Þórarinsson, a k a Biggi Veira, one of the founding members of electronic soul band GusGus. “When GusGus comes on in a club here the crowd goes crazy,” Hilmarsson tells me.

Hilmarsson tells Þórarinsson about the first time he heard GusGus, as a teen in the 90s, when he snuck out to a music festival. They then discuss their summer hike to the highlands with a big group of friends. Everyone was supposed to bring something fun, so Hilmarsson brought the actor Alexander Skarsgård, who had a boot mishap and had to hike barefoot. “After that there was no competition,” says Þórarinsson.

His restaurant Dill has brought the New Nordic culinary philosphy popularized in cultural neighbors like Denmark to Iceland. This is the year you’re going to hear more about him: Gíslason has a book coming out in September in English with Ten Speed Press.

Later in 2014, Dill will move from the Nordic House, a cultural center in a bird reserve, closer to the city center and adding wood-fired pizzas and a bar.

We sit for the tasting menu (three to seven courses begin at about $64), which reveals Gíslason’s flair for both rescuing old Icelandic food traditions and creating new ones.

He does things like smoke meat over sheep dung and brew beer from angelica seeds that he forages for just outside the restaurant.

There are fall-off-the-bone goose legs glazed with Einstock Pale Ale, a craft beer from the north of the country where Gíslason is from. Skyr even appears with a minuscule pastry as an amuse-bouche, and later in a dessert that includes red cabbage and potatoes.

After dinner Gíslason comes over to our table to chat and he introduces us to one of his latest projects, distilling a spirit from the trimmings of birch trees. What could be more Icelandic than that?

Taste-wise, it’s not unlike drinking the essence of a Christmas tree.

Outside the Harpa concert hallNicholas Gill

Creativity like Gíslason’ clearly suggests that the 2008 banking collapse that caused Iceland’s currency, to lose half of its value has also spurred ingenuity.

“In an economic downturn, arts and music are some of the things that flourish,” says Sigtryggur Baldursson, who was a drummer for the Sugar Cubes, the band that helped launch Björk.

Baldursson now works with Iceland Music Export, which both helps organize the annual Iceland Airwaves music festival, and offers data on more than 400 Icelandic bands. “Young musicians play on their own terms,” he says. “They hear bands like Björk and Sigur Ros and they think that they can be different. It’s a good thing for a young person, I think.”

Each musician is different and many are making it on the international scene, which is incredible once you realize that Iceland’s population isn’t much more than 300,000 people.

Getting there: Iceland Air has direct flights to from Newark and JFK to Keflavík International. From about $1,050 roundtrip in mid-May.

Stay: The Hotel 101 is set near Reykjavík’s waterfront, with views of the Harpa concert hall — which opened in 2011 as a potent symbol of Iceland’s economic recovery. The 38-room property includes Icelandic art and furniture by Eero Saarinen.From $262.